From Gutenberg’s Exile to the Bouquiniste

For many years I carried in my head an unfinished project that I called Gutenberg’s Exile. That phrase was shorthand for the complex relationship I have with books and reading. I was cut off from the printed word, expelled from the Gutenberg Revolution. A little twist of fate in my own DNA forced the expulsion. I felt the exile’s sense of loss and longing for a native land to which I could not return. I espied it from a distance, through a clouded lens. I listened for reports and rumors. Sometimes I swore defiantly to blow it up altogether, its barriers and its complacencies. Other times I mustered the exile’s resignation to move on and make a new life.

Throughout my wayward, molasses-like career in grad school, I entertained Gutenberg’s Exile as a dissertation topic. That doomed it from the start to the realm of avoidance and unmet obligation. In the margin of one proposal my graduate adviser wrote, “Where are you going with this — alienation?” The prospect of joining the ranks of the post-modern privileged who write impenetrable prose about cultural oppression didn’t light any fires for me. I did construct several sturdy essays exploring the literacy of blind readers. Literacy had a certain academic caché then, and the essays allowed me to ask more questions than I could answer. If time were but a stream in which I go a-fishing, I’d revisit and deconstruct every one of them. I nibbled around the edges of Gutenberg’s Exile but couldn’t swallow the whole enchilada. The closest I came to writing about it was a sketch about Soviet literature’s sardonic mistrust of the printed word. It mentioned Bakhtin’s thrifty recycling of an unpublishable doctoral dissertation on Rabelais, which he turned into cigarette rolling paper during the Nazi invasion. And there was Vladimir Voinovich’s hilarious dystopian vision of the future of literature in the novel Moscow 2042: writers then produced unread, self-erasing texts called paplesslit (paperless literature) so wood pulp could be turned into high-fiber processed food for a malnourished proletariat. The byproduct of this sustenance, too, was grimly conserved and recycled. My sketch approached the tone I wanted for Gutenberg’s Exile. It belonged in a blog, not a dissertation. If I can find a draft and convert its encoding, maybe I’ll publish it here.

Letting Go of Sight

I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.

Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).

Media in Transition @ MiT

Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]

Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]

The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]